Ada Limón's Memorable "Overpass"

Ada Limón (Photo by Carla Ciuffo)

I see in the Times that Ada Limón will be the next poet laureate of the United States: see Elizabeth A. Harris, “Ada Limón Is Named the Next Poet Laureate” (The New York Times, July 12, 2022).

Limón’s “Overpass” (The New Yorker, December 4, 2017) is one of my favourite poems of the past decade. I like its not-quite-prose-poem form, its natural tone, and its artlessness almost akin to conversational speech. Most of all, I like its subject – the look down from an overpass, the steel guardrail, the creek, the unforgettable image of the decaying raccoon carcass, the white bones of his hand “totally skinless,” the sunlight “showing all five of his sweet tensile fingers still clinging.”

Here’s the poem in full:

The road wasn’t as hazardous then,
when I’d walk to the steel guardrail,
lean my bendy girl body over, and stare
at the cold creek water. In a wet spring,
the water’d run clear and high, minnows
mouthing the sand and silt, a crawdad
shadowed by the shore’s long reeds.
I could stare for hours, something
always new in each watery wedge—
a bottle top, a man’s black boot, a toad.
Once, a raccoon’s carcass half under
the overpass, half out, slowly decayed
over months. I’d check on him each day,
watching until the white bones of his hand
were totally skinless and seemed to reach
out toward the sun as it hit the water,
showing all five of his sweet tensile fingers
still clinging. I don’t think I worshipped
him, his deadness, but I liked the evidence
of him, how it felt like a job to daily
take note of his shifting into the sand.